$100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition: 2022 Semi-Finals

Good morning, everyone. We are coming to you live from Silicon Valley. Welcome to the second annual $100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition. It is my honor and privilege to host the event today with an incredible lineup of veteran investors and entrepreneurs. My name is Ryan McLeady, and I'm head of global operations for the Founder Institute. I'm also a general partner at the Veteran Fund. As many of you know, the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. Over the last 13 years, we've launched over 6,000 startups across 200 cities with the largest mentor network in the world of 25,000 mentors. So over the last 10 years, I've had the privilege of helping build the national startup ecosystem for the military veteran community, and I'm excited to continue that work through the Veteran Fund, where our mission is to protect America through the venture capital. You learn more about the Veteran Fund by going to www.veteran.fund. I believe that our generation of veteran startup founders will become the next greatest generation of world and business leaders, and now is the time to empower these veteran leaders to build companies and technologies that will positively impact the world. So since day one, our goal has been to unite this veteran community, and so I'd like to take a moment to thank all the partners who've come together to support this event, including Bunker Labs, Context Ventures, Academy Investor Network, Vets in Tech, the Second Service Foundation, the Military Influencer Conference, Warrior Rising, Vets in Tech, Techstars, FedTech, 550 Capital Partners, Patriot Bootcamp, and Veterans Future Lab, among many others. So our community continues to grow. I'm really inspired to see how far we've come over the last decade, and we have a lot more work to do. So for the event today, we had over 500 people register. And this event had about 120, a little over 120 founders apply to pitch. The competition was fierce, but we've selected the 12 semifinalists who will be presenting today. After the event, the judges will select 5 finalists who will pitch live on stage in Las Vegas at the Military Influencer Conference on October 28th to win a $100,000 investment from the Veteran Fund. So these finalists will be announced on social media in the next 48 hours. So be sure to follow the Veteran Fund and Founder Institute on LinkedIn to see the announcements. Because we have a global audience today, also make sure that you say hello in the chat and tell us where you're tuning in from. We have people from all over the world. We've got members from different services, military spouses. So say hi, tell us your name, tell us what you're working on. We'd love to connect with you. So let's go ahead and get started. Here's the agenda. In a moment, I'll introduce a panel of veteran investor judges for the pitch competition. Then we're gonna start the pitch competition. Every founder will have 3 minutes to pitch their company, and the judges will have 3 minutes to ask questions. Towards the end of the event today, we'll host a special networking session on Airmeet, which will allow you to meet other founders, mentors, and investors from the event today. So make sure you stick around until the end where we're gonna share that link to the networking session. And as a reminder, this is a live international event, so please say hello in the chat. Let's go ahead and get started. First up, it is my pleasure to introduce Emily McMahon, General Partner at AIN Ventures. Emily, this is your second time around joining us. Thank you so much. How are you?

I'm good.

I'm good.

And I'm very, very happy to be here today. As Ryan mentioned, this is my second time judging, so I'm really excited to participate another year. And just a little bit about AIN Ventures, we're a seed and pre-seed focused venture fund. We invest at the intersection of deep tech and dual-use technology. We also invest in military veteran-led startups as well. And I've been very connected to the military veteran ecosystem. I was a prior Bunker Lab city leader, and I used to run an incubator here in the Washington, DC area that focused on military veteran startups. So very happy to be here, and I'm based in Arlington, Virginia. So thanks.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for joining us, Emily. Great to have you here. Next up, I'd like to introduce Tim Shah, managing partner at Contex VC. Tim, thanks for joining us. How are you today?

Hey, I'm doing well. Thank you all so very much for setting this up, Ryan and Mike. This is awesome for the veteran community. Real quick, Contex Ventures based in San Francisco. Apologies that you all saw me walk through a conference area. I'm currently at a conference, but this is what I'm completely focused on. For the next few hours and have set up properly. Context Ventures, we are a pre-seed/seed fund focused in two distinct categories. One is consumer startups and the second is military veteran entrepreneurs. We have invested in 10+ startups since the fund started and I'm very happy to be part of this community. And again, thank you all, Mike and Ryan, for setting this up.

Our pleasure, and thank you for your time today, Tim. Next up is Mike Shcherbakov, my good friend and general partner at the Veteran Fund. Mike, how are you?

I'm doing well, Ryan, thank you.

Do you want to do a quick intro on yourself and the fund?

Yeah, that sounds great. Great to see everyone here, looking forward to hearing the great pitches. My name is Mike Shcherbakov, I'm based in San Diego, spent 5 years active duty as a Marine, and after going to school, kind of started on the founder operator side, ended up having some small wins and shifted over to the advisor investor side. And in addition to running the Founder Institute program in Southern California in the veteran vertical, at the beginning of this year with Ryan and two other great partners, Justin Ahamma and Lisa Song Sutton, we popped up the Veteran Fund. So we are an early-stage venture capital fund. We invest in veteran-led companies, military spouse-led companies, as well as dual use technology. So if there's a government and commercial application, we like to write $250K to $500K checks into these pre-seed and seed rounds. And we are very actively investing. We're always looking for great companies. We've made 4 investments and we'll make 21 more here in the next 18 months. So I'm really excited to meet the great founders today. Really grateful to be on a panel of incredible VCs, Emily, Tim. So excited to get this started.

Awesome, thank you, Mike. So just to reiterate, like, what we're going to do today. So today are the semifinals. Last year we just did one big online event where we picked the winner. We're switching it up where we're doing the semifinals online. We're going to have 12 founders pitch today, and we're going to select 5 who will pitch live in Las Vegas at the Military Influencer Conference. So if you're interested in learning more or attending that event, we'll put some information here in the chat. And so while we welcome David Franklin, the founder and CEO of KnowRx Health, to the stage, let me just kind of go over some criteria here for the pitch competition. So the very first thing is that we have a sheet back here that we're gonna be sharing and comparing notes. We have a rating system that we use at Founder Institute, and we're basically going to be using that as a way to determine who the finalists are in the event. What each founder will do is they'll share their screen, they're gonna have 3 minutes to pitch, and then we're gonna do about 3 minutes of feedback for the judges in case they have comments or questions that they wanna clarify. So after the event, we're gonna pick the winners and then announce it on social media either tomorrow or first thing next week. So David, I see you've joined us here. How are you today?

Very good. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, good to see you again, or I guess not see you, we can't see your screen or your camera, but if you want, you can turn it on. And then you can share your screen and get started. So for everyone here in the audience, David is the founder and CEO of KnowRx Health.

Yeah, Ryan, the functionality features in the program doesn't give me the availability to share the screen or my camera right now, just the audio.

Okay, let's see if we can adjust that on the back end here. Veda, would you mind giving David the permission to share his screen? So while we wait here, I'd love to kind of just go through the chat. It looks like David just dropped off here. I'm going to go ahead and pull— while we're adjusting the settings on the back end, I'm going to bring up Simon. Simon, I know you're here in the audience. I'm going to give you the chance to come up here. All right, so we've got David here, we've got Simon. There we go. Hey Simon, how are you? Are you able to share your screen?

I am.

Okay, great. So David, I think we invited you to the stage as well, so it looks like everything's working. So here's what we're going to do, David, we're going to start with you first and then we'll move over to Simon. Simon, you know, you can just hang out here and we'll call on you next. So David, as a reminder, and I know you've been through Founder Institute, so you know the drill, but we'll give you 3 minutes and I'll let you know when time is up. Thanks so much. All right.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'm David Franklin, founder and CEO of Norex Health, and I'm excited to share with you our solution of how we diversify clinical trials for better health outcomes. But why is this important today and how is this impactful to each of us? It's important because the demographics of America is changing more than it ever has. And with this, health policies must change too. And over the past few years, we all went through a pandemic together. And during this time, there was a focus and spotlight on inequities in healthcare for marginalized communities. But it didn't start with COVID-19. It's actually been there for decades. It's been there so long that nearly 80% of clinical trial data has insufficient data that proves safety and effectiveness for non-white participants. And where does this begin? It begins with the recruitment, giving access and awareness to clinical research to these communities. These are real photos taken this summer of how clinical trial operations continues to happen. We believe things can be better. The NAREC solution is better. We engage the community, we empower the community, and we educate the community. We know that 76% of patients said that they would prefer this opportunity to come through their trusted provider. We listened and we did just that. We built a mobile application that provides timely notifications around clinical research so the patient can communicate with their provider about this opportunity. In addition to that, we increase their medication adherence and health literacy, like through partners of Harvard Health Publishing. And with the providers, we continue to engage them, and we educate them and give them a learning management system and knowledge base to where they have the equipment they need timely to communicate these challenges. Now, with over 1 million providers in our machine learning database, we can precisely and with speed identify the right provider to connect with that can engage and educate the right patient population for these new drug developments. Now, we have competitors in the space. It's longstanding, but we have differentiated ourselves to help us become emerging leaders for clinical trials and diversity engagement. Last year, over 3 months with Johnson Johnson in a pilot, we reached out across 10 cities and reached 15,000 physicians that can engage upwards of 1.5 million African Americans on the COVID-19 vaccine. This can be life-changing. That quickly turned into an 18-month contract valued at just over $1 million with Johnson Johnson. But since then, we continue to increase our revenue. We have a strong pipeline and growth moving forward. We sell a data-as-a-service model and a platform-as-a-service model to clinical operation companies. And right now we have an open seed round available for investment. We have a strong leadership team in the biopharmaceutical space and clinical operations space with combined over 50 years, and me, a Gulf War Navy veteran as a technologist. Now's the time to engage with us. Now is the time for diversity. Thank you so much.

Awesome, David, you came in under time, so thank you for that. In fact, it was perfect timing. You must have had a lot of pitch practice. I think you also went through Techstars as well. So, so very, very interested to learn more and thank you for sharing. So let's go ahead and take 3 minutes for any questions or comments from the judges. Mike, Tim, Emily, do you have any comments or questions?

Just a quick question, David. Great presentation, by the way, really impressive what you've been able to do today. What do you see as the biggest headwinds for you? We know kind of navigating the whole healthcare system, health tech, anything is challenging. What do you see as the biggest challenge in front of you right now?

Yeah, even more historically, yes, but we more have tailwinds now because legislation is changing and the FDA has already put out a draft guidance for diversity plans and clinical trials. So there's a movement and there's better timing now than ever before to do this. So really it's just change management, incumbent systems having to change, Changing the architecture. In the J&J process, we were approved as a new technology concept, so they recognize how we're doing something different and they're embracing that. So just getting the organizations to see the change, but fortunately, like I said, legislation and the FDA is already pushing this change out into industry as well.

Emily?

Yeah, a quick question. I guess, what are you going to use your raise for? What are you going to put it towards? In terms of this? And you said it was a seed round.

Yes, it's a seed round. Right now we're a team of 6. We're very strong, but we need to accelerate and we need to capture the market. So we have to be in front of the buyer more frequently than what we're doing today. So a large portion goes towards resources that builds out additional product, R&D, and marketing sales.

Okay, great.

David, one of the things that we like to do is really kind of like broadcast outside of the money and the competition, like How can the people in the audience help you? So who exactly is that person, that buyer that you're trying to get in front of? And maybe someone here today can help you with that.

Yeah, that's, that's very important to us. So we sell into pharmaceutical companies or clinical research organizations. So those can be academic facilities, it could be hospital healthcare providers that conduct research, it could be CROs, the contract research organizations. So there's 4 or 5 different types of client buyers. Anyone conducting research is somebody that we would want to engage with.

Go ahead, Tim.

Hey, David, two questions. One is, have you looked at the veteran cohort? Because oftentimes I see the VA really wanting to do some studies with veterans. Then the second is, how do you make money?

Yeah. Relative to the veterans and Like with all of us, that's close to me too, being a disabled vet. We just received an Innovator Award from UCFF, Roseman Institute in San Francisco, and they enabled us to start having conversations with the San Francisco VA on a CRADA project. So we're engaging in conversations there to help give back to our community, which is very important of having medications that are applicable to us when we're deployed or at home. Now, how do we get money? So our margins, like on our first contract, was around 42%. We received the protocols from clinical operations, we run that against our machine learning database, we identified the providers, and then we're able to engage with them and communicate clinical trial opportunities downstream. So really it's precision marketing to a certain uh, point of placing impressions. So we're graded unlike traditional recruitment. We don't recruit, we engage and we educate. So we're paid more on a site level of location of engaging those primary care physician, our trusted providers.

Awesome.

Thank you, David. So that's all the time we have for questions. Great job. Uh, we'll keep you posted on, uh, who the finalists are after this. And thanks once again. Why don't you stick around? And if anyone in the audience has questions for David or wants to connect, be sure to ask in the chat. You can connect offline as well. Next up, we have Simon Carmichael, the founder and CEO of RefundWiz. Simon, it's great to see you again. How are you doing today?

I'm doing well. How are you, Ryan? Congratulations on becoming a father.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's the third one, so father of three now. And yeah, paternity leave has been great. I'm glad I was able to take a little bit of time to do this during paternity leave. But thank you so much, Simon.

Absolutely. So I'm ready when you are.

Okay, well, why don't you take it away? We'll give you 3 minutes and we'll go from there.

And you all can see my screen.

Good to go.

Okay, cool. Thank you. I'm Simon Carmarker, founder of RefundWiz, a financial solutions provider for underserved demographic groups. We have an app digitally filing taxes, focusing on the Hispanic community. A tax filing problem: IRS lingo and forms are hard to understand. There's really nothing available in Spanish. Current solutions are too expensive. There are fewer than 10,000 trained and qualified Spanish-speaking tax preparers. Just to give that data point some context, there are 62 million Hispanics in the United States. Our solution is as easy as uno, dos, tres. Here's our RepaNYU words. Uno, you open a new account. Dos, you scan your ID and W-2. And tres, you file your taxes and process a refund. Now, processing refund opens an opportunity for banking services. Refund with debit and credit card will help empower 10 million Hispanic households that don't currently have a habit of using a bank account. We can transform the community from cash-based to credit/debit-based payments, help repair, build credit. We address the challenges faced by this community. Fewer than 18% have access to broadband or PCs. Greater than 95% have access to smartphones and the internet. For easy deployment, we'll launch in 9 states that don't currently have a state income tax filing requirement and for single filers. Total Hispanic population is 13.6 million and single filer population 3.5 million. So our projected revenue based on acquiring 300,000 single filers is $7.5 million. Our go-to-market multi-tier strategy includes sponsoring Spanish podcasts with built-in audiences on Spotify, launching in Bávaro, the ambassador affiliate and referral list programs using geofencing for laser-focused ad buys. First of this month, we launched a soft Facebook ad campaign. So far, we've already signed up 90 users, and these numbers will increase drastically as we ramp up the daily spend. Our competitors, TurboTax and H&R Block, well, they're focused on high-dollar-value clients, and others don't even have a DIY product. And no one can beat our price point at $25. Our roadmap includes adding additional tax preparation services and really serving the military kids coming out of basic don't have a clue about the W-2s, where to file, how to file. Our customer testimonials from last season include no-brainer, easy to use. Our team has a deep understanding of the tax ecosystem. As a former manager with H&R Block, countless times I witnessed customers being turned away with no habla español. Our milestones include onboarding Jason Calacanis, Luonta VC, and Loyal VC. The ask is raising $450,000 in seed funding. Primarily, the funds will go towards customer acquisition and developing additional features. This is Ripen With. We make tax filing easy as uno, dos, tres. Gracias.

All right, great work. You came in with about 15 seconds left, so thanks for coming in under time. Let's go ahead and jump into the questions from the judges. So Who would like to start?

I'm happy to kick this off. Simon, great presentation. Always a fan of everything that you're working on and obviously something that's near and dear to your heart. I have a question on the go-to-market. It sounds like, you know, one of your channels was Facebook and you said you ran this campaign and got 90 signups. I'm interested, A, in those— did those signups actually convert to customers? Did they use RefundWhiz all the way through? And the second part is, have you tested any of the other go-to-market channels that you're planning to use some of this capital raise for?

Awesome question. Thank you. So the customers who are signing up are signing up to use the app when the tax system launches roughly around January 20th of next year. And so really there's no way to use that app to get those results. And we are testing the ambassador program by working with community leaders. And so San Bernardino County and in Florida, Orange County. So this is when an immigrant, for example, lands in America. How do they know where to go to get a haircut, where to buy groceries, where to file taxes? And so we're also going after the younger Hispanic Gen Zs and millennials who really demand purpose-built apps. So those are the two channels that we're really focusing on.

Quick question. How do you— you probably get this question a lot— like an H&R Block, if they decided to focus on this, how would you fend off a competitor like that? Um, at your size?

Yeah, so what's really cool about this app is that we're completely AI, ML, and cloud-based. So H&R Block, um, as a former executive, I can tell you that this is the first year they're moving all of their data from physical locations to cloud-based. So they have an app, but it's in bulk on, so they can't access any prior year tax returns, for example. And, um, really in terms of technology, they're not quite ready yet to embark on using OCR because their whole focus is that concierge-level service, right? And so they're going after the small business, the day traders, people whose tax bill ranges around $1,200 and not the standard deduction. And the same thing really applies for Intuit and TurboTax.

Any fun—

Hey, Simon, two questions. How do you worry about seasonality? In terms of like the business, right? Because it's like a very lumpy business in terms of once a year. And then the second question is how, like, if you're charging $25, what type of margin or revenue will you get per tax transaction?

Yeah, awesome question. So that was the first thing when we started thinking about launching this company, that we don't want to be a one-time purchase model. And so when they opt in for that debit card or credit card, we create a monthly recurring revenue model of $299 or $399 a month depending on what they opt in for. And so we have that one-time purchase model and they can be, you know, they already have a debit account or a bank account, they can move that refund onto it or they can opt in for the banking services. And then the beauty of RefundWith is that there's a whole ecosystem behind this. So have a 10-year horizon on this. Is that we want to launch savings with investment, with micro-lending with. And so once they come in as a compelling reason to file returns, we can offer a lot of these à la carte services down the road. So my calculation is if one person were to opt into all the services that I'm looking to offer from that hub and spoke model, we can actually get $48 monthly recurring revenue from a given customer.

Awesome. Well, that's all the time we have today for questions. Simon, great job. Thanks for joining us, and we'll be in touch. Next up, we have Monica Fullerton, founder and CEO of Spouse.ly. Monica, how are you today?

I'm good.

How are you?

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Awesome. Let me get things rolling here. You guys see my screen?

Yes, we can see you and hear you and see your screen.

You're good.

Okay. Some technical difficulties before. All right. Hey everyone, I'm Monica Fullerton. I am the founder and CEO of Spouse.ly. Did you know that the military spouse unemployment rate has been at 24% for nearly a decade? Why? Because military families relocate on average every few years. Which makes it hard for spouses to hold a career doing something they truly love, if one at all. Because of this, many spouses are turning to entrepreneurship, but sometimes it can be hard to find and support their businesses, and companies like Etsy are not specialized to serve the military market and community. I was so inspired by the amount of talent within our community alone, I knew I had to do something. So I launched Spousely, an online marketplace where you can shop a wide variety of both products and services, all created by military and first responder families. It is through our one-of-a-kind platform that anyone can shop small, make a big impact, and purchase with a purpose. But Spouse.ly is so much more than just a shopping platform. It has turned into an entrepreneurship hub. We're providing growth consistency, community positioning, that single location for those patriotic consumers that are looking to to support those who support us. And over the past year, we've seen a whole new window of opportunity with corporate gifting, squadron gifts, and wholesale opportunities. So how do we make money? Well, on the product side, we have low fees to be on the platform, and then we take 10% from each sale. 7% goes to Spousely and 3% goes to our partnership with Stripe. And on the service side, it's a low annual fee of only $35 a year, and that's because it's serving as just a marketing platform. So those fees are very low, and we have a lot of room to build and grow as we continue to provide consumers to the platform. We've also opened up another revenue stream, streams through our strategic partnerships that are helping us position Spouse.ly and also providing funding. So on the sales side, consumers are 4 to 6 times more likely to purchase, protect, and champion purpose-driven companies. And we know those patriotic consumers are always looking for a way to give back. On the vendor side, there's over 12 million military spouse-owned businesses. And let's just take that 6 million number and add the 2.5 million businesses owned by veterans, and then open that up to first responders. We're looking at over an 8 million possibility of vendors. And our largest competitor has grown to 7 million vendors and has turned that into a billion-dollar industry. Even if we capture just a small percentage of this 8 million number, we're still looking at a very lucrative multi-vendor marketplace. So since launching, we've grown from only 30 vendors to 400 and adding more on a weekly basis, all just by word of mouth. We've had seen a 60% revenue increase year over year. I've been bootstrapping. So as you can see, we've only just scratched the surface of what this is capable of. And we have amazing partners like USAA, Elevon, US Bank, and we made the Forbes Next 1000 list. And have been named on the Mighty 25 list as one of the most influential leaders supporting the military community. So I hope that you will join me in putting more funds in the pockets of our nation's heroes.

All right, good timing there. One second over, but we won't—

sorry, I know I was cramming it all.

Great job, Monica, and congrats on getting this far bootstrapping. I know how hard it is to go from zero to where you are and love what you're doing. So thank you so much. Let's go ahead and ask a few questions from the judges. Who would like to start?

I stumped all of you, really? Come on.

No, I'm happy to jump in. I just feel bad being the first one each time. So Monica, great pitch, first of all. Love the aesthetics. Congrats on the progress you've made, as Ryan mentioned, bootstrapping this to date. You know, I see the marketplace as, the first opportunity. And I do have concerns about the total market there as far as the market opportunity goes. Have you considered— I know you mentioned entrepreneurship education. Have you considered creating some kind of recurring membership model where it's more of a community, there's a more robust education, not specifically for them creating products and listing them on a marketplace, but entrepreneurship education and starting other types of businesses?

Yes, and I'm so glad you asked that because yes, I mean, we have to continue building other revenue streams and ways to continue growing and making that impact. So we recently just launched Spousely U, which is powered by USAA, and the goal of that is going to be to continue building and providing tools and resources to help these businesses grow and thrive no matter where they might go. And it's also another revenue stream option because we can have other sponsors inside of it that maybe want to help these entrepreneurs learn more about taxes or, you know, different things that can help position them and providing that education as well.

That's wonderful. Yeah, I'll just add the last thing is I think that there's a big opportunity. I think you have a great name. I think you've already started to build a great community. And if, for example, Founder Institute is focused on high-growth tech startups, if historically you've been focused on creating products for an Etsy-like shop, to have everything in the middle of any other type of business. I think there's a big opportunity there. So well done.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Monica, quick question. If I was to say go to Spousely and this is like, this is the best thing you can get, better than anything. What would that— is there like one kind of product or one kind of thing that you're sort of become known for? And then I have a follow-up question to that. Yeah.

Yeah. It's very similar. Like instead of looking on Etsy to go to Spousely and changing the mindset to make Spousely that household name, because now you're not only just, you know, purchasing a product, you're helping these families. Do what they love, you know, while moving around.

We—

probably the best sellers are the more custom gifts, just because, you know, people are loving, and that's what they go mostly to Etsy for as well, is when you're looking for maybe that, that family portrait or a stained glass, like, fighter jet. Like, there's just so many cool things, and that's what's allowing us to position ourselves. But I wanted to mention with the corporate gifting too, that's a whole new window of opportunity. We just did a huge project with Elevon, and basically They created curated boxes that are only a couple of our vendors, and then it's all around our mission and what our vendors are doing.

So is there anything you're kind of going head to head with Etsy on? And it's like Etsy struggles at this, therefore we're really trying to exploit what, you know, is there anything that you're really trying to fill a gap on right now?

Yeah. So as all of you know, you know, our community superpower is support. And unfortunately, when they first launched and everything, it was all around community, but then they opened their doors to, you know, a lot of companies that weren't small businesses. And so it started pricing out these small business owners because they can't compete with, you know, items that are being manufactured at the masses and things like that. So what we're bringing to the table is not only just the community feel for those that want to feel comfortable being around, you know, like-minded people that get it, we're also staying exclusive to all of our vendors being approved military spouses, veterans, and yeah, all of them.

Great.

Thank you.

Hey, hey, Monica, great job. And congrats so far on everything you've done. Two quick notes. One is, have you looked at the company FAIRE? F-A-I-R-E? They of course do wholesale and they are crushing it. Just like— and so I'm curious your take on that. And then the second one is, given that you have a captive audience of spouses that are buying, not just selling, potentially would you introduce non-veteran companies that are offering like significant discounts to veteran spouses?

It's something to consider, you know, as we continue to grow, but I really wanted to stay true to all of our vendors being approved within the community because that's truly what separates us. I mean, nothing's stopping our competitor Etsy to go and develop out, you know, military supported or whatever, but they haven't done that yet, which is why I know if we can get the right funding and the right people behind this, we can continue to build and then align. I'm actually in talks with a few other corporate companies that would position Spouse.ly for more of those larger corporate orders, wholesale orders. And so we would merge with them to place Spouse.ly vendors in their platform as well.

All right. Thank you, Monica. That's all the time we have for questions. But Great work and excited to see this continue to grow. Thanks for what you're doing in the spouse community.

Thank you. I appreciate all the support.

Bye.

All right. Next up is Michael Chapman, CEO of Fieldcraft. Michael, how are you today?

I'm very well, myself.

Doing very well. Good to see you again. So whenever you're ready, you can share your screen. And then once you get started, I'll hit the 3-minute timer.

Okay.

Hi, I'm Michael. I'm CEO at Fieldcraft, and we are building the B2B marketplace and digital supply chain for agriculture. The agriculture is the largest industry in the world, but it's stuck in a pre-digital age. So the problem with selling food and beverage commodities starts with the producers, and they have little to no tech to actually do it, and they're all trying to get in front of these small and medium-sized buyers. There's 20,000 new food and beverage products launched every year. So downstream, this means buyers resort to using outdated databases and Google searches, and they have to manage multiple vendors offline and perform the same task with each one of them. So our marketplace connects both sides with greater transparency and efficiency. So since launching, we have over 500 producers who have joined, and they range from farms to the largest food and agriculture company in the world. Over 3,000 small and medium-sized buyers are on Fieldcraft to supply sourcing. We found this gap in the market between consumer and industrial solutions. So on the left, you'll see solutions for producers selling direct to consumer in hyperlocal markets. And on the right, for buyers sourcing primarily two big commodities, also in hyperlocal markets. Fieldcraft is solving for national and highly fragmented markets. Fieldcraft is led by two co-founders. I founded a contract marketplace for growers and buyers, which— this is how we found this gap in the market. I'm an Army veteran. I led special operations teams in the CIA and later served in several locations as CIA Chief of Base and then in the White House Situation Room. Christie's developed technology and data solutions for small to Fortune 100 companies around the world. And this is our tech. It was all built in-house. So we're streamlining this entire process from end to end, and we're starting with probably what the hardest part is— discovery. So our platform improves discovery for buyers, and the storefronts reduce marketing costs for producers. And next is integrated sample management, which turns a manual and cumbersome process into a seamless experience. And finally, fintech solutions to simplify transactions. So we earn fees based on sales from producers. This is a $120 billion market opportunity, and there's over 200,000 obtainable producers in the US alone. So where we started, where we're going. We launched the marketplace. We're backed by SOSV, which is a FUNAG investor. We started growing and building network effects. We hit our goal of 500 producers this year. We enhanced the product from sample to sale. And then grew to 3,000 buyers. We're closing the seed round to build up the product from search to sale so producers can invite their existing customers, which will accelerate growth and network effects. And from there, we're scaling the marketplace in the US to reach $100 million ARR, which is only 5% of obtainable US producers. We are Fieldcraft. Thank you.

All right, awesome work coming in under time. Thank you, Michael. And it's good to see the, the presentation again. So Let's go ahead and move to the judges. Who would like to ask the first question?

I'll kick things off. Question, Michael, for you. In terms of your next milestones, I guess, what do you need in terms of talent, resources? Like, how do you hit those next milestones, and what do you need to do that?

So the next milestone is obviously closing this round, and that's going to be hiring engineers, talented engineers, continue to build up this product. So the search piece of this is solid, the design is great. That's one of our biggest assets. So we've done quite a bit with very little, maximize resources, very limited money to this time. But yeah, so the next piece of that is that sample integration. And so that Because everyone orders it. That's the first transaction. Everyone starts with a sample, obviously, you're not gonna order a ton to a truckload of product without testing it first. And so that's that next piece to continue along that transaction until you have a fintech solutions at the end.

Cool.

One other question. Where are you based out of?

Austin, Texas.

Austin, Texas.

Okay, great.

Thanks.

Hey Michael, real quick. Why, why this project? I mean, this is really interesting and congrats on all you've done, but like, why is is this a project?

Yeah, so I grew up on a farming community, uh, and like literally right in my backyard was fields, and they changed every year. So as a kid, this always kind of became a passion of mine. And so I stayed on top of the industry. You know, as a contract lawyer, I saw a lot of litigation going on with the absence of contracts or very poorly drafted contracts. That's why I founded the contract marketplace connecting growers and buyers, and that's how we found this gap. There's much larger opportunity beyond that.

Michael, great presentation. Good to see you again. Tell me a little bit about the competitive landscape and, and what it would take to get, you know, both sides of the marketplace over to your platform versus what they're currently using.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think our target, our go-to-market, especially on the sample piece of this, are growers, value-added growers in particular, and small, like, manufacturers, small processors, millers, those types. This is a paper industry right now, and so I'm not competing right now with QuickBooks. They're saying they're looking into getting online to doing invoicing and online payments. You know, right now, because we've been doing this manually on the back end with these sales, you know, I build a buyer online and I send a check. The other person sends a check, and that completes the transaction. So we're going pre-digital to digital now.

Any final questions here? Okay. Michael, thank you so much. That's all the time we have. We're going to move on to the next pitch, and we'll let you know what the results are. Up next is Robert, COO of ACE Inc. Robert, good to see you. How are you today and where are you calling in from?

I'm well.

How is everyone? I'm calling in from Metro Detroit, Michigan.

Awesome. Sounds good. Well, whenever you're ready, you can share your screen and I'll hit the timer to get started.

Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Bob Kirschneider and I'm the co-founder, COO of ACE. So the idea of ACE first began in response to a fellow co-founder who was taking over bill payments for his grandmother who had developed dementia. However, it evolved from there very quickly because we learned early on that a much larger portion of the population could actually benefit from the solution we were developing. Everyone we know worries about their bills and struggles to manage their finances. We're all living off of autopay, which seems to sneak up on us every month. It's not in sync with our payroll cycle, and more importantly, when we actually have money in our account. We don't maintain a clear line of sight into our finances because we're all pulling this information from multiple different sites. And we all struggle to pay down our debt and save for the future because we don't know how much we can allocate from each paycheck to put towards those goals. In short, Americans are stressed out about money. They have trouble understanding and managing their finances, their bills, their debt, their savings, their investments. They lack the financial certainty that comes with knowing their true discretionary income. And look, we're kidding ourselves if we think they're leaving these concerns at the doorstep when they enter the workplace. In fact, financial stress increases absenteeism, reduces productivity, and generally makes them inefficient to employ, with businesses losing an estimated 17% to 21% of their salary per employee. And it doesn't stop there. Financial stress can and does impact physical health, and this makes employees more expensive to insure to the tune of additional $413 per employee per year. But it doesn't have to be this way. Here at ACE, we pay employees recurring financial obligations automatically and directly via payroll so that when a paycheck hits their account, it actually feels like a payday. By tying these financial obligations directly to payroll, we give employees a better understanding of their true discretionary income and a better financial picture so they can better save, invest, and live a healthier financial life. With the end result being that when they know their true discretionary income, it reduces their financial stress, makes them healthier, more productive, and ultimately cheaper to insure. So as we execute on our plan, I'd like to share some of our key traction to date. Namely, we've executed a successful alpha pilot. We've identified 6 pilot customers to participate in beta. We've engaged in preliminary conversations with the corporate headquarters of a top 5 fast food restaurant chain to run a beta. We've secured commitments from 12 benefits brokers to demo our platform with the intent of offering our solution to their clients. We've executed a partnership with Atomic, the market leader in payroll integration. We've added both an HR expert and a business finance expert to advisory board, and we've secured or obtained commitments for $290,000 of our $450,000 pre-seed round. In conclusion, here at Ace, we started our business because we believe that healthy finances means healthy living, and we aim to improve the physical health of our members through the financial certainty that our solution provides. Thank you.

All right, great work, Bob, coming in under time. So let's go ahead and move to the questions. Mike, Emily, Tim, who'd like to kick it off?

I'll kick it off. Can you talk a little bit about what are the existing alternatives right now? Like, what is your— what do your competitors look like?

So there's no one currently in the financial wellness space that's offering bill pay directly from payroll. There's quasi-competitors in the space. There's a lot of earned wage access, like your PayActives or your evens. And we view those as, you know, they're great when compared to like a payday pay loan, but they're not true financial wellness. They're really just kind of kicking the can down the road. And then there's competitors in the space like a Doxo or a Prism where it's an all-in-one bill pay site, but those are direct-to-consumers. It's not a financial wellness play, and it doesn't go through the employer's wellness benefit.

Mike or Tim?

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in. Great presentation. I love the intention behind it and the purpose. My question is, you know, you've identified this beta pilot that you're running. Have you successfully had, you know, users and employers and employees go through from beginning to end? And then the follow-up question is, if so, what's been that feedback?

So we've run a successful alpha pilot, which has been proving out the functionality of bill pay. We're currently developing the beta development, which will include enrolling individuals in a new virtual bank account and connecting to payroll. So once we have that complete, we'll be running those beta pilots later on this year.

Okay, and so just for a point of clarification, so I'm understanding, is the alpha pilot similar to them just having autopay features? What makes you different from, you know, paycheck coming in and then autopay paying the bills?

The difference is that autopay doesn't connect, it doesn't sync with your payroll cycle. We're running these bill pay jobs directly in connection with their payroll cycle. So we're paying these bills the very next day after they get paid, as opposed to autopay that hits all over the month, not in sync with your payroll cycle. And again, when you actually have money in the account.

Got it. Okay, thanks.

For these large companies that you're engaging with, why, what's the main selling point? Like, why are they interested in this beta?

So the main selling point for, well, for the individual, of course, you know, it reduces absenteeism, makes them more productive at work, that, you know, there's ROI for the employer there. But there's also a stick stickiness factor, and there's a, you know, a factor of letting the employees know that they care about their financial wellness and they want them to stick around. There's, again, there's a stickiness factor in that not every employer has this available to them. So while we don't view ourselves as sticky as like an unvested 401(k), it's something that would at least cause an employee to consider whether they want to move to another job if they have to take over all of their bills again, they have to pay them all out of, you know, on their own again, as opposed to this automated process that was set up for them. Plus, it's also a great recruitment but also retention aspect because employers right now, especially with the Great Resignation going on, they're looking for any way to recruit but more importantly retain their top talent. And this is one of their ways to do it. A lot of them are looking at financial wellness tools to do that.

All right. Awesome. Bob, thank you for your answers to the questions. We're going to go ahead and move to the next pitch. Appreciate you joining us today.

Thank you.

Next up is Debbie Parra. Debbie is one of the co-founders of S4 Technologies. Hey, Debbie, can you hear us and see us OK? It looks like you're on mute.

There we go. Can you guys see me?

There we go. Hi there.

Hello. All right, here we go. Hello everyone, I'm Debbie Perez Cervantes from Espoir Technologies, where we are focused on seeing what can't currently be seen. So before I begin, I just want to show you what we mean by our slogan. This is what a camera with a 1 billion gigapixel looks like of a butterfly wing. Our device can do just that. So corrosion costs the US $276 billion annually. That amount is over 3% of GDP. Globally, that cost is $2.5 trillion, and each bit of that corrosion is causing risks that the components will eventually fail. One thing you don't want to fail due to corrosion are fuel storage tanks. There are 500,000 of these in the US alone. 1.4% of fuel tanks will have leaks, and this is despite an expensive, time-consuming system of inspection. The problem is that current inspections require emptying the tanks and are done in a subjective visual manner. Using personnel to do this also has safety issues such as confined space and fall risks. So our solution to this problem is our new S4 radiography detector that uses X-ray imaging to provide an improved ability to see the problems. By moving to X-ray rather than visual, it eliminates the previous mentioned issues. Our device has the ability to see smaller defects which gives a quantitative rather than qualitative evaluate— evaluation. Our process is expected to reduce the time of tank inspections from a week to less than a day. The way we do this is with a patented high-pixel camera. It was invented at Los Alamos National Lab. This device is a compound camera that has been likened to the complex eye of an insect. The result is a 1,000 times improvement and the number of pixels, which allows for both better resolution and a larger field of view. Our team is shown here and includes a metallurgist, physicist, and entrepreneur. Our inventor is highly engaged, and our mentor trains VCs and is a VC himself. Corrosion monitoring is currently a $289 million— sorry— with an 11% compound annual growth rate. In the US, inspections cost $3,000 annually plus $220,000 every 20 years. That turns out to be $2 billion a year and 5 times that globally. We expect that within 5 years we will be selling 200 systems a year at $100,000 each for $20 million in revenue annually. Our competitors are either visual inspectors or small-scale current X-ray devices. We can see an area 20 times larger with 10 times better resolution than current X-ray devices. Our planned business model is to develop the gigapixel camera to be a large mobile device. However, there are several other options as seen here. If we win the Veteran Pitch Competition, our team will continue customer discovery and marketing, develop a prototype, and apply for SBIR to leverage nondilutive funding mechanisms. Help us help others see what can't currently be seen. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Debbie. Great timing there. Very interesting technology. So who'd like to kick it off for the questions?

Sure, I'll kick it off again. So two questions. Do you have the license for this technology?

I'm assuming— so we're actually in the process of working with National Labs to obtain the license.

Great.

And then, so this is sort of an interesting So who is the target client within the government? So for instance, if you guys do go after a specific, you know, SBIR, is what organization is sort of your target client within the government funding realm?

We would love to work with the military, as they do have a lot of fuel storage tanks. In fact, when I was in the Marine Corps, that was my MOS. I was a fueler.

Yeah.

And one other question. Sorry, guys. Is there like a documented example of, you know, this happened and it was on the news and we could all point to and say, as a result of this, you know, sort of like something very top of mind in terms of a, you know, a real-life case study of the impact of this?

Or—

there are a lot of fuel leaks that have happened that have caused a lot of ecological issues. I'm sure that if you Googled it, you could probably find it. I just don't have anything off the top of my head.

So one piece of feedback is just like, if there is an example, almost like the Three Mile Island of, you know, gas leaks, it might be helpful just to sort of conjure up, okay, this really is like a true, true pain point, and sort of have everyone resonate with that really early on. So great.

Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else?

Hi, Debbie.

You talked about how much you're going to price it and sell it, but how much will it cost to build each one?

So we are new. We're still working in this and we do need to do some more research to find out how much it will cost to create this. So that's something that we still need to figure out.

Is there maybe a ballpark like $20,000, $40,000, $100,000?

You know, we, we are too new to know that right now. I don't think— I know that our inventor said that it wasn't that costly. I just don't have the numbers off the top of my head. But it will be something— he did mention that after time we should be able to get the price down to $50,000. So it's definitely going to be cheaper than that to create.

All right, Mike.

Yeah, Debbie, great job. Really interesting presentation. I mean, obviously you're very early, and so I think taking advantage of the non-dilutive funding, the CIBERSITTER grants, is a really great option. If you do win the competition, what do you plan on using the $100,000 for?

Research and development, for sure. We need to do more research. As this, this is in TRL 4 currently. We want to progress that into the TRL 5. We do more research into it, then we'll be able to modify the camera to what market we want to tap into.

Great, thank you. Well done.

All right, we're going to move on to the next pitch. Debbie, really good to see you. Thank you for joining us today. Up next is Eric Schnell, CEO of Crater. Eric, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. How are you doing, Ryan?

Great. And where are you based?

I'm out of San Diego, California.

All right, you guys just had a hurricane. Glad you're okay.

And unfortunately, I dodged it. One of the two days of rain we get a year. I was up in the Bay Area, so I got to enjoy the heat wave up there during that time.

Perfect timing. Alrighty, whenever you're ready, you can go ahead and start your presentation.

Sounds great. Can you see my screen?

Perfect.

Thank you.

Excellent.

All right.

So my name is Eric Schnell. I'm the founder and CEO of Crater. 4 years ago, my team and I were first introduced to the Digital Manufacturing Unit out at Camp Pendleton. These were a group of Marines that were kind of pushed out ahead to try and find out how 3D printing can best support the supply chain of the future, a more distributed force and distributed maintenance. However, they were struggling because 3D printing is a delicate technology, a precision technology that doesn't work in the environment where it's needed most. Expeditionary environments. We spent 6 months working alongside the Marines there, and we saw that they were spending more time working on the limitations of 3D printing as opposed to the 3D printing companies working around their limitations. And we decided that we had to do something about that. So we formed Crater and built Intrepid, a 3D printing platform that prints where no one else can. A rugged, portable, intelligent, mobile 3D printing system that has been built in the field alongside our U.S. Marine Corps. The key advantages of this system and what really sets it apart is that it's man-portable and is a high-temperature 3D printer, meaning that we can print composites and ultra-polymers that are typically restricted to machines larger than refrigerators and at half a million dollars. We're also the first 3D printer that has been designed to meet military standards. Basics of 810G and 461F. We are also the only 3D printer that has been able to successfully print on the move. We strapped in the back of an amphibious combat vehicle and drove around the dunes of Del Mar printing the entire time. And we just got off shipboard testing with the Navy last week. We've integrated machine learning and automated quality assurance programming to help solve key problems identified by the Marine Corps and the other services. And we are entirely modular, which allows easy maintenance, cheap repair, and also gives us a certain level of supply chain resilience. What, what we built up to this point has been due to our collaborations with the U.S. Marine Corps and through the other services. We're looking to do a pilot run later this year. We've also been identified for programs of record we uniquely qualify for. Those are so important at the moment because they help set the standard. With 3D printing as an initial technology that is being deployed, we look at programs of record to help make us a foundational element long term. Just starting within the next couple of years, starting with the Marine Corps and the other services, we look to see this market grow quite exponentially. And with our current market rate, with the 3D printer, the products we look to offer alongside it and our materials, We look to be able to support long-term with initial and recurring revenue. This market can be quite huge, but we're also looking into beyond the DOD, other expeditionary industries, medical applications, looking to test and legitimize through the DOD and scale to industrial markets. These markets can be quite huge and we're looking to be able to start the DOD and move beyond. Our team is supported by experienced personnel, both from industry and within the DOD. And we have advisors who have experience from the Marine Corps, the Air Force, really all the services, and helping us deploy this. And to do this, we're raising $3 million to help build out our management team, scale and develop our pilot run, and help grow our partners.

I gave you a couple extra seconds there.

I apologize about that.

No worries at all. Really interesting. And, you know, thank you for that. So So let's go ahead and jump to the questions from the judges. Who would like to start? And you can unshare your screen when you're ready.

Absolutely.

Hey, Eric, great presentation. Real quick, how competitive is the space? Because I feel like there's a lot of competition. I've just seen a number of 3D printing companies, whether it's established companies to up-and-comers. Curious how you see the competitive landscape.

Absolutely. There are tons of 3D printers and we're not the only one who recognized the need for 3D printing within the expeditionary space. However, we are the only 3D printer that has been able to print on the move, that's been able to survive in these environments and has actually been proven tactically. There's loads of other 3D printers, Markforged 3D printers, TAZ 3D printers, Stratasys printers that have been deployed in these environments. And we've seen every single one of them fail when it really— when they were needed most. And that, I mean, that's kind of where we started, is to make something different. So when it comes to expeditionary printing, we're really the only ones doing it right.

Okay.

So Eric, yeah, really interesting. Good to see you again. You know, I think there's a novelty. I think it's cool. That, you know, it's expeditionary, you strap it on the back of an amphibious vehicle. My question is like the actual use case, like, I would think that, you know, generally 3D printers are going to be in areas, you know, either behind the wire, they're going to be in areas where you may not need to do it on the move, where you're going to be stationary. So can you talk about that? And a quick follow-up question, I love that you're expanding beyond government. We love dual use for that reason, a path to commercialization. Can you talk about some of the potential use cases in the other industries that you mentioned, whether it was medical or otherwise?

Absolutely. So for the first one, we've actually engaged in multiple forms of contact testing and in the kind of the way that we do stuff right now when it comes to, and the way we've done stuff in the past when it comes to supply and force deployments, I would say yes, most of the case that would actually be behind the line and wouldn't, it would be— need to be expeditionary, but not quite to this level. However, all the different services are focused on a reinforced, or basically a new force deployment. Essentially, they're planning for peer-level engagements over the next 10 years. And to do that, they're focused on decentralizing their supply as much as possible, and being able to support conflict, for example, in the Pacific, in which they require systems that are man-portable, that can be deployed to that expeditionary level. And so that's kind of— we've gone that direction because we've been told, hey, we want you to go this direction. Now, when it comes to the second question there and the more on other expeditionary industries, one of the unique parts of our printer is that high-temperature printing, which means that we can print materials like Ultem that are medically certified and can actually be steam autoclaved in the field for sanitation. Which means we can actually make surgical tooling components for actual medical support in environment. So we can support field medical hospitals, both for disaster relief and in developing nations. That also includes the applications for other more expeditionary industries, oil, gas, mining, construction, transportation. Throw this on the back of a train and now you have a local maintenance anywhere in the, that on that track, various other applications like that. We're only just starting out that path.

Go ahead, Emily.

Your time. Yeah, I think the only question I have is how do you defend just the time in terms of being primarily defense-oriented right now? And when people say, you know, what happens if this takes a lot longer than you have it projected? How do you guys survive in the so-called valley of death of government procurement?

That's a great question because we're going through it right now. Go end of fiscal year, huh?

Well, just, yeah, I was gonna say, wink wink. So, yeah.

So at the moment, our focus is kind of this initial pilot deployment within the DOD and really kind of scaling long-term through there. That gives us that opportunity to really test, legitimize, and build out the technology. But long-term, the dual-use markets kind of more in these industries, countries are looking at the long-term kind of reliable cash flow and supporting us kind of long-term in there. Given a lot of the markets I mentioned are still government markets, for example, disaster relief is primarily funded by the federal government. So we will kind of chart that path as we go. And one of our goals with our fundraise is to bring on management staff who have a lot of experience in that and can help us chart that path.

Great.

Great.

Thanks.

All right. That's all the time we have questions for you right now, Eric. Thanks so much. Really interesting technology. And we'll be in touch.

Thank you very much.

Up next is Bill Bruner, U.S. Air Force retired and CEO of New Frontier Aerospace. Bill, it's good to see you. When you're ready, go ahead and share your screen and kick off the presentation.

Thanks, Ryan, and good to see you again, Tim. And we'll share our screen here in full-scale presentation mode and we'll start. Hi, I'm Bill Brunner, CEO of New Frontier Aerospace, and we are building a renewably fueled aircraft that can deliver urgent cargo and passengers anywhere on Earth in less than 2 hours, faster and cleaner than jets. Our Rocketliner takes off and lands vertically at airports and vertiports in thousands of locations thousands more locations than jets can. We can carry 17 passengers trans-Pacific in 2 hours or 100 passengers trans-Atlantic in an hour, burning renewable fuel with a net carbon negative fuel pathway. We fly 10 times faster and 4 times higher than today's jets. So high, there's very little noise on the ground. Our first market entry will be urgent medical logistics to include human transplant organs. We have a signed letter of intent from a major US hospital system to buy our services at air charter rates, about $3 million a year. This will be our entrée to the $120 billion air cargo market, ultimately the $270 billion addressable hypersonic passenger market. At market studies show operators can charge up to $100,000 per seat, and they could— operators can still make money at $15,000 per seat, which is the same as today's first-class rates. We make our money by 3D printing our aircraft for $20 million and selling them to operators at Gulfstream prices. Our team of accomplished founders is from NASA, DARPA, and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. I flew jets in the Air Force, was a senior leader at NASA. Our COO built the engine that Bezos trusted to launch him into space. Our company president led the program that built the first rocket to take off and land vertically before Bezos or Musk did it. Our secret sauce is a unique application of metal 3D printing, not only to the engine but the aircraft. We've printed a prototype in heat-resistant metal, and we'll be scaling that up to flight size. We've also built a demo version of the engine. Heavy here, hope I don't get a hernia. Uh, we are faster, quieter, and cleaner than supersonic jets from our competitors. We're smaller than point-to-point Starship, so we can land more places. Uh, our fuel comes from renewable sources. Our farm-to-fuel pathway is net carbon negative. Replacing today's jets with the Rocketliner will pull 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year. We have letters of intent to buy our engines from space companies, a letter of intent to buy organ transportation flights on the Pathfinder vehicle, and our BD team is lining up air cargo and air charter companies to buy the Intercontinental. Early revenue comes from engine sales starting in 2023, transitioning to vehicle sales from Pathfinder and Intercontinental in the following 3 years. We received over $900,000 non-dilutive in grant funding, raised a $200,000 pre-seed, have a signed $3 million term sheet, and I have in hand hundreds of millions of dollars in signed letters of intent to buy our products. The $3 million seed will be used to finish the engine next year. We'll concurrently raise $40 million needed to build Pathfinder and test it and turn it into a product. After that, Series B to build the Intercontinental. And then the expensive part, which is to certify it. Our media team's done a great job producing compelling content, getting the word out. We have an active presence on social and free media, articles forthcoming in Unmanned Systems and other outlets. We're on a roll and we are ready to scale.

All right, Bill, good timing there. Thank you for the presentation. Really, really interesting technology there. So let's go ahead and jump into the Q&A part. So who'd like to start? And Bill, whenever you're ready, you can unshare your screen.

I'll take it off and share now.

I'll take a stab. Bill, great seeing you again. Great presentation. What's the 2 or 3 biggest risks to your company?

A, regulatory, getting it certified, the airplane certified. It's like Boeing getting Dreamliner certified, it's going to be tough. That's why we're building the smart small vehicle and we're selling into military markets. We're proposing to DIU to build one of these things here this week. Um, and the second risk is scale, uh, scaling from 4 employees to thousands of employees building big rocket planes. I mean, same thing that SpaceX did over 20 years, and they're one of the few who've navigated this thing, you know, since, um, the big defense primes grew up in the last century, but scaling and regulation.

Yeah. So you stole my thunder. Tim, are you good? Are you sorry?

You didn't follow up?

I think those are absolutely things that are worrisome, but I think this is truly a moonshot, if not a Mars shot. And I think you're doing yourself a disservice by not sharing like revenue, right? Because like, yes, those are absolutely massive pain points, but this could be a multi Billion, trillion, right?

Actually, right. That's right. Thank you.

Um, Bill, great presentation. Um, I think you know my partner Sherman, so I know you guys have talked.

Hi to Sherman. Thanks.

Yeah. But, um, question for you. What is the, what does the competitive landscape look like right now? Just in terms of other, you know, other companies that are trying to do this and, and the pushback you get just given your size right now.

Right?

So the supersonic guys are slower than we are. Um, they raise a lot of money, but their engines will take literally billions of dollars just to develop the engine. We printed this for less than a million dollars, 250 or 2,500 pounds of thrust, uh, as operable as a jet engine. We think we tested a major component of it under government contract, so we think we have a big advantage over anybody who's building an air-breathing engine because their costs are going to be exorbitant. The rocket guys are bigger, uh, SpaceX for example, uh, competitor to us, but we're flying, um, they want to go to Mars, so their vehicle is extremely fast and extremely big, and they're going to have a hard time landing at smaller airports, and we won't. And so our competitive advantage, both technical, operational, uh, I think will win the day.

Bill, great presentation. Really interesting technology. Congrats, by the way, on securing $30 million LOIs. I know it doesn't come to fruition for at least a few years until everything's developed. My question is, with this kind of industry, it's obviously very capital intensive and $3 million seems like a very small raise. Is $3 million enough to get you to that engine?

Yes, that is actually our advantage. My engine guy built the Hadley engine, which was an ox-rich stage combustion engine, the first one in history. It's being sold now. He did it for $2, $2.5 million. And so our real advantage is that we have an experienced designer, we have the advent of 3D printing, and we have highly efficient, highly advanced designs that can be printed for not a lot of money.

There's a—

like Tim said, there's going to be a revolution here. There's going to be a lot of money to be made. We're going to print these things like hot All right, well, Bill, great presentation.

Thank you so much for joining us today, and excited to, to see this develop. Very, very cool technology.

Thank you, my friends. Take care.

Take care. All right, up next we have Eric Alvarez, but he's not joining the stage here, so maybe we can move on to Jocelyn King. Oh, there's Eric. Okay, Eric, how are you? I think— there you go. We can, we can see your screen, but we can't hear you yet. There you are. Hey, how are you, Eric?

How are you?

Good, good. Thank you. All right, whenever you're ready, um, you can go ahead and start, and then I'll hit the timer.

All right, well, hello everyone. My name is Eric Alvarez. I'm an Air Force veteran from Chicago, Illinois, and the proud CEO and founder of Grapefruit Health, The problem we're solving for is this massive workforce shortage in healthcare. We're gonna be short by 3.2 million workers by the year 2026. We see demand skyrocketing and the supply of clinicians dwindling. And the question is, how are we gonna take care of far more patients with far fewer question, uh, clinicians? And part of the answer to that question is with Grapefruit Health. We are creating the first and only workforce composed entirely of clinical students who perform telephonic healthcare tasks. The way this works, our solution, step 1, we really recruit and train and manage clinical students. Next, we provide the technology, a platform that we've built from the ground up that allows for the data capture and the delegation of tasks. And then lastly, we acquire the patients. So we acquire our patients from healthcare organizations as well as concerned family members. To get a little bit deeper here on the B2B side, the type of programming we're doing is this really high volume lower acuity type tasks. So we're matching social working students, for example, with military veterans, or we're doing high-volume post-discharge follow-ups with nursing students. On the D2C side, we're actually doing wellness checks. You can think of it as a Credit Karma weekly report on your, on your loved one's kind of trending healthcare needs. The TAMs on both these are very large, $6.3 billion on the B2B side and $7.2 billion we've calculated on the D2C side for a total of $15 billion. Why Grapefruit Health? Great question. So if you're using your lowest cost healthcare staff member, that's a community healthcare worker, that's roughly $11 per interaction, we're going to charge just $5, a 53% savings there. And that's if you can find your CHW, because there's 2 open jobs for every unemployed person today in the United States. We have 1 million of these clinical students across the country who are ready to work. And on the recruitment side, a huge value proposition here for our clients is really the recruitment piece too. So they want to recruit our students when they're done working with them. Why clinical students specifically? When you're trying to solve for human-to-human interaction in healthcare, you have the non-licensed worker, think gig economy, you have a lower-cost clinician like we discussed, and a clinical student. The clinical student's by far the lowest cost. They need the experience, they have the passion, interest, and motivation. Who's more motivated than a student? They're available for hire. So we're really addressing that big gap. And this is— this works really at the top of their license versus a licensed clinician who might be higher value at the bedside. We have a kick-ass team here of clinicians and technologists. I am the CEO and founder part of this as the chief operating officer, healthcare technology company that was acquired by Cerner, large EMR. And in the last 1.5 years, we've won over $160,000 in non-dilutive funding, including $100,000 from Google who really believes in what we're doing, completed 1.5 accelerators, we built a team of 6 folks, built out our fully functional tech platform from the ground up, completed a successful 12-week pilot, closed our first major B2B client, which in healthcare enterprise is not easy. And then we've raised over $550K today on a $1 million open pre-seed round. And with that, I would love to take some questions.

All right, great timing. Thank you, Eric. So let's go ahead and jump in. Mike, you want to go first?

Yeah, happy to kick this off, Eric. By the way, love the passion, enthusiasm. And my question actually kind of tails off of that is, Why, why are you doing this? What's your reason behind this?

Yeah, so I have an extensive, deep background in healthcare. So I have my master's degree from a top 5 MHA program. I'm on faculty there today at Rush, and I mentor tons and tons of clinical and nonclinical students, including veterans who are looking to get into entrepreneurship and innovation there. And so I've heard the issues that they can't get this kind of clinical experience that they're looking for around their schedules that actually pays them. Clinical rotations don't pay. After that, I was a hospital administrator at the University of Chicago and Northwestern. So I saw the pain of staffing shortages. Actually in the industry. So I know the problem extremely well. And it was these two, the intersection of both of these experiences that led me to this kind of solution. I'm also an entrepreneur. And so when you see a solution, you're kind of compelled beyond reason or logic to go solve it. This is a hard problem, but we're really excited about doing it.

Hey, Eric, great presentation. Can you share more about traction? You talked talked about, you landed a customer. Like, how much revenue is that? How long is the contract? What other potential contracts?

Yeah, so on the B2B side, we landed a contract with a healthcare system here in Chicago. We're going to be doing all their diabetes prevention program enrollment calls for them. So that's a— we're hoping to, you know, so this is like an ongoing contract. So we charge kind of per interaction in tranches of interactions. And so we think we'll do about $150,000 there in the next 12 months, but our pipeline's growing. I'm a professionally trained salesperson in B2B healthcare. I've sold many 7-figure contracts. And so it's, it's just pursuing that component. And then this funding, part of this, what we would utilize this round for is on the D2C side, which is the technology and the supporting infrastructure is there, but we'll be launching that in January. And that, that requires some bivariate testing with your marketing, right? So we're going to be doing both social media campaigns and, and, and the likes to get that going. But That's really our traction. So we're early in that. We're about a year and a half old now.

So who takes on the risk if one of your clinical students messes up?

Yeah, I love that. We get it every single day, right? And so what people outside the industry— healthcare, the bulk of healthcare is actually done by non-licensed folks. If you look at the industry, insurance or the front desk or the schedulers, right? These are people that are actually providing healthcare. And sometimes we're even doing like preoperative instructions, but they're not licensed. So We're no different. So we're actually— I would argue that a clinical student, it's very competitive to get into these programs. They already have exposure to HIPAA, they have the background checks, they have a lot of those things that bring them up to a really high level of worker. And so then they're doing this work. So the risk is no different than a call center person in a healthcare system that I've managed in the past. And then we do other things too. So, but to answer your question directly, we take on that risk. So we have the insurance to do that. We hire the students as our, as our 1099 contractors. And then we, you know, through the MSA, BAA, SOW process on the B2B side, we address all those items.

Great. Thanks.

Sure.

All right. Eric, great presentation. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to move to the next pitch, and we only have a few left, and then we'll start the networking piece. So up next, I would love to welcome Jocelyn King. Jocelyn, I see you're here with us now. When you're ready, you can go ahead and share your screen and kick off your presentation.

Okay, great.

Thank you so much for having me.

And where are you based, Jocelyn?

DC.

Great.

All right, whatever.

All right, well, thank you again for having me. My name is Jocelyn King, and I'm the CEO and founder of Virgil HR. The HR community is experiencing a very dramatic challenge today. Employers are responsible for complying with thousands of federal, state, and local employment and labor laws that change very frequently, supersede each other, and run concurrently. And on top of it all, with this mass influx of remote workers, HR practitioners now more than ever are experiencing this heartburn because they have to start complying at the local level all across the country. And as a result, Employers are spending a ton of time and money tracking compliance requirements, with the average HR practitioner spending between 4 to 8 hours a week on compliance tasks, and it leaves them exposed to significant risk, liability, and cost. And just to illustrate how much of a problem this is, in 2021, there were over 61,000 EEOC charges filed against employers, 1,600 workplace class action lawsuits, and an untold number of private charges, and U.S. employers ended up paying over $4 billion in workplace settlement fees. Not to mention the fact that in the US, more than 1 in 10 employers is sued every year by their employees. And to make matters worse, there isn't an effective solution for HR practitioners today. If they're dealing with a compliance task, they're either going on Google and researching requirements online or they're speaking with lawyers, but it's either timely or costly. It's very manual and there's a lot of room for error. So what we did is we've designed a solution that leverages automation technology to provide instant employment and labor law guidance to HR teams. It's credible. It's accurate. It's actionable employment and labor law guidance readily available at HR's fingertips. And it doesn't require a single bit of research on their part. There are a lot of benefits to cost and time saving for sure, mitigating risk and liability across the organization as well, and giving HR teams a lot of time back to focus on other areas of the business. So what is it that we offer? We offer a knowledge center, and the bread and butter is our automated chatbot. The automated chatbot will engage with the HR practitioner when they submit a compliance query and will ask diagnostic questions to help determine what federal, state, and local employment and labor laws apply to this specific scenario they're working on, and then provides very prescriptive legal guidance to them so they know how to make compliant employment decisions. In terms of market opportunity, by 2028, the HR tech market is projected to grow to $35 billion, the legal tech market to $22 billion, and we're targeting employers with 100 employees or more, of which there are about 164,000 in the US. We have really exciting traction in our 10 months. We've already developed and launched our product. We've acquired our first 6 beta customers. We're venture-backed by the Society for HR Management, and we've raised $900,000 to date. And we've done this because we have a rockstar team. Our VP of products, a labor and employment attorney who's worked for the likes of the EEOC, our VP of engineering who's managed engineering teams the last 10 years, and I've been an HR practitioner the last 13 years and have held roles such as the VP of HR for the largest tech company on the London Stock Exchange. Our business model is a subscription-based business model. We offer individual and team subscriptions as well as an enterprise subscription, and our ask is we're seeking an additional $700,000 in funding for go-to-market, R&D, and hiring key staff. Thank you so much.

All right, awesome. Thank you, Jocelyn. So let's go ahead and start with the judge questions. Emily, I see you.

I know, I feel like this is like a game show. I unmuted first. So great presentation. And I have to say, it's so, it's so great to see like a solution that is tech-oriented first. I feel like so often we see services and are trying to push people into tech So this is fantastic, but I have to ask you, is there any thoughts of offering a service component to this when a small organization hits a brick wall? Or do you have any sort of partnerships laid out if, if an organization needs sort of like handheld help, what do you guys do at that point? Or is that something that's just not in the roadmap right now?

So it is very much in the roadmap. We've already identified an organization that would provide attorneys that can give labor and employment law guidance to HR professionals when they just aren't getting enough out of the product. They just have that extra question. But we want to wait and see first the feedback that we get from beta customers before investing in something like that. So they've already been identified, but we're going to wait and see what people are asking for.

Great.

Yeah, Jocelyn, really interesting. Congrats on the progress so far. The 6 beta clients you have. My question is, you're raising $700K, you talked about using that for go-to-market, but unless I missed it, I didn't see a go-to-market strategy in the presentation. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I imagine it's kind of a long sales cycle.

I know it's really hard including everything in a 3-minute pitch. So I had to take go-to-market out. But yes, I can definitely speak to it. There are a few key areas, a few key channels that we're particularly focused on. The first is actually like direct outreach that's been really successful for us so far. So direct outreach is a big component of our go-to-market strategy. But we're also heavily focused since this is very much a product-led growth model, we're heavily focused on digital. So ads, for example, social, email campaigns. We are also going to conferences. Conferences has also been a successful channel for us too. So those are some key areas, but content is going to be one of the most important components to our marketing marketing strategy.

Thanks, Jessica.

And just a quick follow-up on those ads that you've been running, do you have metrics on that and have they been successful?

Yeah, we do. So the Google Ads have been successful. LinkedIn Ads haven't been as much, and I'm not surprised because I've been told by others that LinkedIn's very expensive and you don't always get what you need out of it. We've also started Facebook Ads as well, and we've only launched our product 2 weeks ago. We've seen some good traction on NRUs, which has been really exciting. And those have mostly come from Google and Facebook. And then we are looking at advertising as well on professional association sites like SHRM, for example. SHRM has invested in us, so we're partnering quite a bit with them. And advertising with them is something that we'll definitely be leveraging as an opportunity.

Hi, Jocelyn. 2 quick questions. One is, what's the incumbent landscape and specifically how competitive is it? And then second, associated with that, how important are integrations? And if they are, what are you trying to integrate and what software are you trying to integrate into?

Yeah, 2 really great questions. So from a competitor perspective, we don't have any direct peer competitors today, but we do have indirect competitors that are also trying to achieve the same outcome for HR professionals. These are generally going to be digital libraries, companies like Expert HR or Mineral or HR360. You'd go onto their website. You would do research, kind of go through their articles and try and figure out, you know, okay, I've got an employee who's taking maternity leave in California. I'll click on these links and try and look for some content that they have available for us. But it's very manual and it's time intensive. I've used them myself as an HR practitioner. And that was one of the reasons why I felt like there needed to be a more automated solution. So those are kind of the incumbents in the space right now. And it's just very timely. And it's not— it doesn't leave you error-free, let's just say, because you only know what to look for. When it comes to integrations, we've actually built out our product so that it can integrate with HRISs, HR Information Systems. So that capability is already there. We suspect right now we're focused on mid-market. We suspect that that's probably a play for enterprise just because of the implementation process. And then we are speaking with other HR tech vendors, including HRISs, about integrations into their platforms that we can be a part of their marketplace as well. And that's also— that partnership aspect is a big part of our go-to-market strategy too.

All right, Jocelyn, thank you for your pitch today. That's all the time we have for questions. We're going to go ahead and move to our final pitch. Of the afternoon today. So Lee, welcome back. How are you today?

I am excellent, outstanding. How are you guys?

Very well. So Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Pixlee. Lee, whenever you're ready, go ahead and share your screen.

Awesome. All right, well, thanks for having me here today. It's an honor. I'm a Navy veteran and I'm a startup veteran, and I'm the co-founder and CEO for Pixlee. We've created the easiest way to snap, tag, share, and instantly document construction project photos that allow for immediate collaboration and help people build better and faster. The AEC is the architectural engineering construction industry, and it's massive. The problem that they experience with photo documentation is that it takes a ton of time. You're taking photos, you're uploading them to servers, you're downloading them, you're marking up with PowerPoint, you're emailing and texting, and it's just, it's a horrible workflow. So we eliminate all that by creating a super simple, easy-to-use app that happens. Everything happens on the app in real time, no matter where you are in the world. The construction industry is massive. The software aspect of it alone is close to $3 billion in a few years. And everywhere you turn, you'll see construction projects. Photos and photo documentation is really time-consuming, but it's, it's necessary because there's so much litigation and there's so many disputes. 30% of projects end in dispute. So whoever has the best documentation wins that dispute. It could be for $100, it could be a million-dollar dispute. Also, the industry has massive worker shortages, so being more efficient in the job site is more important than ever, and companies need tech to win. So what we've built is a super easy-to-use mobile app that requires little to no training. Take photos, they're instantly shared in feeds, organized in albums, and you can add tags. Tags is where we have IP. You can place a tag on a photo to document anything specific to it. You can add comments, questions, observations, and you can assign them to people as a task to get things done, built better and faster with accountability. And then there's a dashboard in your hand so you can see what needs to be done on the job site or what's not done with the photos to support it. We also have a web app version. So one of the things we really want to do is eliminate unnecessary travel to job sites so owners, architects, inspectors, anybody else can log in from their office and see everything as it's happening. Just like they can on the app. The value proposition is all about saving time. Time is money. Instantly document your project. Sync teams to build better and faster. Eliminate, eliminate deadlines and timelines that slow things down. Create valuable data around the projects. Assign and track tasks to build better and faster. Find photos when you need them. Customers might need a photo 8 years from now when litigation pops up, and it could take them days, weeks, or months to find those photos. And it's really all about building better, building faster, and reducing risk of litigation. We have an issued patent that we just renewed about placing tags on photos that we believe has massive value for ourselves and for the industry and licensing opportunities as well. We've got a proven financial model based on previous success with Raken and other B2B SaaS companies I've worked for. We have traction, we have users, we have IP, we have letters of intent, we have active users in a major partnership that's about to launch. And we have a sales pipeline. The team— I've been in the startup space for many years, and I've got a robust team that can help bring this to life. Thank you for your time and interest and consideration.

All right, great timing with 3 minutes. Let's go ahead and jump into Q&A. Who'd like to start?

I'm happy to kick it off. Lee, great to see you again. Always great to kind of hear the updates and your progress. So congratulations. Can you talk a little more about the IP? You mentioned it briefly that that's your IP is in kind of the tagging feature. And yeah, can you kind of elaborate on that, please?

Yes. So we have issued patents on placing tags on photos in a cloud collaborative platform that we know has massive value. There are other competitors in the space that are infringing on it. Whether they know it or not. So we will be approaching them about licensing. But the IP also has value outside of construction. So we're part— we're going to participate in the AFWERX project. So Pixely could be used to identify here's a broken fan blade or an F-18 before and after the repairs and anything that would happen to it. Insurance, medical, shipping. There's lots of latitude for what we can do with the IP.

My question is, there seems like there is like a dual-use component to this. And so are you guys— yeah, what does that look like in terms of just, you know, how do you focus your efforts in terms of scaling between sort of, I'd say, government funding and then commercial?

Yeah, right now the focus is specifically on small to medium-sized general contractors because we know that's where they have the most pain. That's where we're having the most initial success. But we also have early users in facility management. So construction, you're starting from dirt and you're building something and handing over the keys and all the intricacies that happen with that. A facility, a hospital is already built, but they have planned maintenance, they have boiler inspections, they have boiler repairs, they have elevator inspections and everything else. So we're honing in on those two first because that's where we know we'll get the most traction. And we have limited resources and time, so we have to laser focus.

On that.

Hey, Lee, observation and question. One is great job in terms of presentation, and also I love the industry tackling construction. It's massive, it's sleepy, there are opportunities for startups there. This question is there's some veterans and also some companies in the space. One is Grumbix and another company is Sightline. They started off somewhat trying to do what you're doing and then moved to like billing and tracking. I'm curious what you think about why they might have shifted and whether or not companies will actually pay for what you're trying to do right now.

Yeah, I'm intimately familiar with Rumbix and the other company you mentioned. I got into the construction tech space as the first VP of sales and marketing for Raken, where I got them to $1 million in ARR in 10 months. And then I spent time at PlanGrid who was sold to Autodesk for $875 million. So I know both of those playbooks. And basically, for this specific industry, you win by getting a pilot project. And then once you get that successful pilot project, it grows and it radiates. It's not really top to bottom selling, it's more from the field up, because lots of companies been burned on buying software that people won't use. So we've gone to great lengths to make sure Pixely is like super easy to use, doesn't require any training. There's really kind of two types of construction people. There's those that grew up in the field and they know how to build and do everything, and now they're superintendents and project managers, but they can do everything and they'll use tech if it helps them and saves them time. Then on the flip side, you have people that are graduating with construction management degrees that know everything about software but struggle to probably put together an IKEA desk. So what makes us different is our ease of use and the field adoption, and it's really our Trojan horse. So what we have now is photos, but we're adding videos and we're going to add what's called 360 reality capture. And ultimately we're democratizing visual documentation and collaboration because now you can do pretty much everything with the LiDAR on the new phones. You don't have to have extra hardware to do the 360 capture.

All right. Any final questions here? Okay, well, we do actually have one more pitch. It looks like there's some technical issue. Um, Taylor from Chimera, where he's here in the event, but we're not able to bring him on stage. So what I'd like to do is maybe go back to the pitch video that he submitted, and then Derek, I see that you're here in the audience. So why don't we do this? Why don't I play the pitch video, and then Derek, since you're the co-founder and CEO, we'll invite you here to the stage so that you're able to answer questions. Does that sound like a good solution, everyone? Okay, so let me pull up the link here. Give me 1 second, maybe 2 seconds. And then, um, Veda, on the back end, if you could bring Derek up, that would be awesome.

Awesome.

So, okay, I'm going to share my screen. Can everyone see this? Okay. All right, let's rock and roll.

Hi, I'm Taylor, CEO of ChimeraXR. We help law enforcement train anywhere, anytime using virtual reality. We've all seen law enforcement come under increasing scrutiny recently for public use of force mistakes. This, in our view, is due to a lack of accessible and effective training. We address these issues by having created a virtual reality training system with realistic hardware, true-to-life decision-making scenarios, and an efficient, scalable training solution to address how law enforcement can move into a new era of training and innovation. Our hardware is simple, easy to set up, under 2 minutes to set up, and is cost-effective. It allows more people to get engaged in training sooner. We've built scenarios that are similarly designed for realism, designed for training those highest-stake circumstances. We have built and designed everything ourselves in terms of hardware and software. And our profit margins sit between 40% and 91%, depending on the product. We have a current roster of 6 national law enforcement and military agencies in 3 countries as clients. We've done about $450,000 in sales to date, and we expect we'll be around $1 million at the end of the year, including a new segment, which is security clients. And we're very excited about this growth, especially internationally. The simulation market for virtual reality firearms tactical training is large and getting larger. We see about $30 million in exact budgets required today, and we see also a larger organizational requirement of $4 billion across North America and the Five Eyes that we're looking to attack in the next 5 years. Where we came from to where we're going, we've raised pre-seed money of $237,000 back in early 2021, and that allowed us to go to market. And we're currently raising again in order to scale our our software and hardware capabilities and create more growth. Our long-term vision is to become a program of record, which makes us a permanent staple in federal budgets. We are also currently raising $1.6 million for 26% of our company, and this is in order to create more demonstration units, increase our reach, and create more capable software, especially as it pertains to de-escalation. And we would like to see more of you join us on this journey. Please reach out with your questions. We look forward to talking to you.

All right.

So I think people from the audience couldn't hear that because I muted myself. But panelists, were you able to hear most of that presentation? Okay, great. So sorry to everyone who could not hear the first half, but we are troubleshooting on the fly. So Derek, you're the co-founder and COO of Chimera. Taylor was originally supposed to give the presentation. For whatever reason, Zoom won't let us invite him to the stage. So we'd love to do Q&A with you instead. So thank you and welcome to the stage.

Thank you so much.

Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Pretty consistent throughout this audience, I think.

Yeah. If only I had some kind of virtual reality training simulation for you. We will help you with that. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Who'd like to ask the first question?

Yeah, I'm happy to jump in. Really great presentation. I know there was only about 15 seconds that was cut off, Ryan, so no worries there. Derek, do you see this as more of a software or hardware play? It sounds like you're leveraging some of the existing hardware, right? Oculus headsets, pistols, the weapons and everything. And can you tell me more about like what's the larger vision with the software?

So it is hardware and software because we do need realistic hardware to be part of it, to participate in using in this in there. So we can't just use controllers when we're actually talking about the use of force. This isn't jazz. We don't really improvise really well. So from a hardware perspective, we do need realistic hardware for the software to work. The software piece is also a really big part because we have a lot of curriculum that needs to be conveyed and, and used in this space. For a longer-term version, vision for the company, we're looking at an intelligent coaching system where we have instructor and student all utilizing different learning and development curriculums that's developed by the instructors. So we have a lot of content and tools and content development tools baked into the software to enable any instructor to develop learning and development curriculum for their students.

That sounds great. And then just to clarify though, so understanding, of course, it needs the hardware to use the software, but you're not manufacturing the hardware yourself, you're leveraging other—

So we are using off-the-shelf virtual reality systems. So we are using the Oculus Quest platform. Platform right now because of the inside-out tracking. It enables us to have our entire simulation system in a box that'll fit in the overhead compartment of an airplane. So we, and we are looking to leverage any virtual reality software that's out there. So we are, we're not manufacturing the components to the virtual reality system, but we are manufacturing and adopting certain pieces of hardware such as different weapon systems to bring into VR, such as tasers, different pistols, rifles, machine guns, etc.

Great, thanks.

I was just gonna ask about, like, just competition in the space, and are there any thoughts or concerns about just focusing on the law enforcement space and their different sales cycles and budgets and whatnot? How do you guys kind of defend against that when people might push back on you, just in terms of some of the challenges of selling across, you know, federal, state, local?

Wonderful question. Yes, this is a competitive space, but we feel that we are, and we have gone up against our competition and won in certain areas, such as fit and portability and mobility of the system. So we are familiar with government procurement. I spent years in that space. So we work with the different agencies to enable them to procure it. Such as credit card purchasing and certain purchasing authorities. So we do have entry-level price points that can enable a purchase through using a credit card, and then we also are familiar with RFPs, RFQs, and helping the different agencies navigate their own procurement mechanisms. They are all over the place. Sometimes there's grants, sometimes there's RFPs that come out from different agencies. So we're on the lookout for all of them in helping the agency themselves. Once we get end-user fit and function, so we have the end user wants it, we will work with them in any capacity that we can to enable them to be able to procure our simulator system.

Hey, Derek, that, or that presentation said, I think, $210K of revenue. Was that booked? Was that sold? Setup-wise, have you actually gone to the field and gotten customer feedback, and have any customers been using it?

Yes, we do have—

so we do have a number of units that we've shipped in the field, and we're getting a lot of end-user feedback from a variety of different spaces. So we are international. We have sales into the United Kingdom, into their Ministry of Defense. We have distribution set up in Australia, New Zealand, across Europe and in the UK, as well as all over the United States and Canada. So we are getting a lot of feedback from our end users. In terms of revenue that's booked, currently we have one purchase order that we've just delivered on, so we are awaiting payment for that purchase order. So it depends on— and cash flow can be tricky when it comes to government customers, we all understand that. And so we look to work with them to either have a deposit if possible, or sign purchase orders to be able to facilitate the development and purchase and payment thereafter.

Alright, I think that was the final question. Derek, thanks for adapting with us. Really appreciate that. I think there's a question here in the chat from David Weaver for you. So when you get the chance, you can connect with David. So that was officially our final pitch of today, about 2 hours of pitches. Thank you, everyone. Everyone for participating. Thank you to the judges. And before we begin the networking session on Airmeet, I just want to say a big thank you to the founders. I know entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging endeavors that anyone can pursue, and so I deeply respect and admire those who choose to step into that arena. So thank you everyone, and everyone who registered for the event today will get a recording in the next 48 hours. Um, if you're interested in seeing who the winners are, make sure you follow the Veteran Fund and Founder Institute on LinkedIn so we can share with you. And then for those of you who are interested in attending the finals, uh, for the $100,000 veteran pitch competition that will be live in Las Vegas on October 28th at the Military Influencer Conference. So if you go to militaryinfluencer.com, you'll be able to register for that event. So let's go ahead and begin the networking session on Airmeet. This is a really good opportunity for some of the people in the audience today to connect with each other, meet other founders, meet some of the founders that pitched, connect with mentors, investors, etc. So in a moment, we're gonna put the Airmeet link in the chat. So it's on a separate platform, not here on Zoom, it's on Airmeet. And then we're gonna leave this Zoom line open for a few minutes so that everyone has a chance to click it and join us on Airmeet. So thank you once again to our entire community, and God bless America. Take care, everyone.